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Optics Letters

Observation of the first excited transverse mode in guided matter waves

R. G. Dall, Sean S. Hodgman, Andrew Manning, Andrew G. Truscott

Published Mar 21, 2011• 7 citations
Publisher

Abstract

In direct analogy to the textbook example of light guided in a few-mode fiber (FMF), we report the observation of the first excited mode of an optically guided atomic beam. We selectively excite the atomic analog of the LP₀₁ optical mode by controlling the energy distribution of ultracold atoms loaded into the guide, resulting in a modal structure dominated by a 47(2)% population in the first excited transverse mode. The ability to guide lower-order modes has been essential to demonstrating optical effects such as multimode interferometry, slow light, and entanglement, and an atomic analog to a FMF may lead to similarly useful applications.

DOI
10.1364/ol.36.001131

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In direct analogy to the textbook example of light guided in a few-mode fiber (FMF), we report the observation of the first excited mode of an optically guided atomic beam. We selectively excite the atomic analog of the LP₀₁ optical mode by controlling the energy distribution of ultracold atoms loaded into the guide, resulting in a modal structure dominated by a 47(2)% population in the first excited transverse mode. The ability to guide lower-order modes has been essential to demonstrating optical effects such as multimode interferometry, slow light, and entanglement, and an atomic analog to a FMF may lead to similarly useful applications.
Ultracold atoms whose de Broglie wavelength is of the same order as an extended confining potential can experience waveguiding along the potential. When the transverse kinetic energy of the atoms is sufficiently low, they can be guided in the lowest order mode of the confining potential by analogy with light guided by a single mode optical fiber. We have obtained the first images of the transverse mode structure of guided matter waves in a confining potential with up to 6565%65 of atoms in the lowest order mode. The coherence of the guided atomic de Broglie waves is demonstrated by the diffraction pattern produced when incident upon a two dimensional periodic structure. Such coherent waveguides will be important atom optic components in devices with applications such as atom holography and atom interferometry.
The transversely confined propagating modes of an optical fiber mediate virtually infinite range energy exchanges among atoms placed within their field, which adds to the inherent free space dipole–dipole coupling. Typically, the single atom free space decay rate largely surpasses the emission rate into the guided fiber modes. However, scaling up the atom number as well as the system size amounts to entering a collective emission regime, where fiber-induced superradiant spontaneous emission dominates over free space decay. We numerically study this super- and subradiant decay of highly excited atomic states for one or several transverse fiber modes as present in hollow core fibers. As particular excitation scenarios we compare the decay of a totally inverted state to the case of π /2 pulses applied transversely or along the fiber axis as in standard Ramsey or Rabi interferometry. While a mean field approach fails to correctly describe the initiation of superradiance, a second-order approximation accounting for pairwise atom–atom quantum correlations generally proves sufficient to reliably describe superradiance of ensembles from two to a few hundred particles. In contrast, a full account of subradiance requires the inclusion of all higher order quantum correlations. Considering multiple guided modes introduces a natural effective cut-off for the interaction range emerging from the dephasing of different fiber contributions.
We demonstrate the first guiding of cold atoms through a 88 mm long piece of photonic band gap fiber. The guiding potential is created by a far-off resonance dipole trap propagating inside the fiber with a hollow core of 12 μm. We load the fiber from a dark spot 85 Rb magneto-optical trap and observe a peak flux of more than 10 5 atoms s −1 at a velocity of 1.5 m s −1 . With an additional reservoir optical dipole trap, a constant atomic flux of 1.5 × 10 4 atoms s −1 is sustained for more than 150 ms. These results open up interesting possibilities to study nonlinear light–matter interaction in a nearly one-dimensional geometry and pave the way for guided matter wave interferometry.
We study modal propagation of cold atomic gases in a straight magnetic waveguide consisting of a current wire and a uniform magnetic field. This configuration is known to generate a transverse confining potential for atoms with magnetic dipole moment oriented anti-parallel to the magnetic field. The potential has azimuthal symmetry to first order in powers of the atomic distance to the waveguide axis. We obtain the modal dispersion curves by means of the WKB quantization method, and introduce a parameter Q that characterizes symmetric atomic waveguides as the parameter V does in optical fibers. We simulate propagation of cold atomic beams by means of the BPM (Beam Propagation Method) and show the spatial evolution of transverse monomode and multimode profiles obtained for different values of Q and arbitrary input beam profiles. We demonstrate, analytically and numerically, the existence of a threshold Q-value for guidance of matter waves analogous to the V-threshold for propagation in a TE00 mode in optical fibers and obtain that, under the experimental conditions reported in the literature, the already observed Gaussian profile of guided atomic beams corresponds to multimode propagation. RIAO/OPTILAS'04.
Optical nanofibers (ONF) have been proved useful tools to probe cold atomic systems. Due to the intense evanescent field at their waist, ONFs have been used to probe or even trap atoms. However, very little experimental work has been done on exploiting the higher order modes (HOM) of such devices. The HOMs feature inhomogeneous polarization distributions around the ONF’s waist and can lead to the guiding of light carrying orbital angular momentum (OAM), via selective excitation of modes. In this work, we have experimentally studied the interaction between an ensemble of cold rubidium atoms and the HOMs of an ONF. The ONF, tailored to allow propagation of the first 6 guided modes at 780 nm, is embedded in a cold atomic ensemble and its modes are selectively excited by coupling vector beams from free-space. Using modal decomposition at the output of the ONF, we can calculate the transfer matrix of the system. This information, when combined with the amplitude extinction resulting from the scattering of the guided light by atoms surrounding the waist, allows us to non-destructively infer the modal excitation at the waist of the ONF. We further investigate the effect of temperature-induced strain on the modal decomposition at the waist and fiber output pigtail. Our results allow us to encode more than one quantum of information on the total angular momentum of a single guided photon. The inhomogeneous polarization distributions featured by the HOMs also offer a new tool to study chiral quantum systems.